Custom documents are documents that are personalized or tailored in some way to the particular user of the document. Two growing applications of custom documents are in the domain of variable data printing, as well as in web personalization.
Traditional approaches to custom document creation are non-automated and therefore user-intensive, and result in documents that are typically quite similar: the layout is the same for all instances, regardless of the available content pieces. Furthermore, the document creator is responsible for ensuring that the final document adheres to good design principles, and is therefore aesthetically pleasing. Thus the document creator himself typically creates the document template according to his preferred design criteria, which requires knowledge about document design and how to best achieve the desired qualities in a particular instance of the document.
Traditional creation of custom documents such as variable data documents requires expertise in many areas such as graphic arts and databases and is a time consuming process. With the ever-increasing amount of information in the digital world and the amount of untrained users producing documents, old publishing tools often prove cumbersome and demanding whereas present dynamic digital environments demand tools that can reproduce both the contents and the layout automatically tailored to personal needs and which can enable novices to easily create such documents.
Known methods for automated creation of documents have focused more on particular types of documents, and not on modeling the problem in a general way in order to address all types of documents. Existing work provides methods for creating diagrams ( see Dengler, E. Friedell, M., Marks, J., Constraint-Driven Diagram Layout, Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, pages 330–335, Bergen, Norway, 1993), or multimedia presentations (see Rousseau, F., Garcia-Macias, A., Valdeni de Lima, J., and Duda, A., User Adaptable Multimedia Presentations for the WWW, Electronic Proceedings from the 8th International World Wide Web Conference, 1999), or flowcharts and yellow pages (see Graf, W. H., The Constraint-Based Layout Framework LayLab and Applications, Electronic Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Effective Abstractions in Multimedia, 1995). Others have explored automating the process of web document layout (see Kroener, A., The Design Composer: Context-Based Automated Layout for the Internet, Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium Series: Using Layout for the Generation, Understanding, or Retrieval of Documents, 1999).
Known methods for a constraint-optimization approaches to document layout use a single optimization criterion: cost, and model their layout task as finding an ordering of stories and advertisements that can minimize the production cost as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,173,286. The present invention differs in that it offers a more general model for representing a layout problem as a constraint optimization problem, enables the specification of multiple optimization criteria, and provides a process by which to combine required and optimization constraints in order to achieve a well-designed document.
What is needed in the arts in order to ensure that an automatically assembled document also meets desired aesthetic design criteria, is a way to model document creation as a multi-criteria optimization problem, allowing the specification of both required layout constraints as well as desired aesthetic qualities of the output document, and a means to automatically process this combination of hard and soft constraints to automatically generate a well-designed document.